Food sign on the bike path

People still get lost at the north end of this trail at Coleman Avenue, where missing the exit means you’re stuck at a dead end unless you know the secret shortcuts through the homeless camps across the train tracks. Cyclists might miss their connecting commuter train to San Francisco, but they won’t starve to death.

Share this:

5 Comments

What a useless sign! The Guadalupe River Trail badly needs a full set of signs showing street names and exits to streets, and also signs from the street to the trail entrance. Maybe the city’s vision for the trail is that it will be used only for recreation, so you don’t care exactly where you are going and when you get there. Or by people who aren’t particular about where they are going and when.

Yeah, it seems a little superfluous but I personally like that it’s there. To me, it makes this trail more useful for transportation. Purely recreational riders often just go end-to-end without bothering to stop for the amenities in between. I personally don’t see anything wrong with keeping things fun and interesting.

These signs are new north of I-880 and were funded as part of the trail improvement project from the airport to Alviso. SJ Parks says they’ll try to fund similar signs for the trail south of the airport next year.

it’s been a while since i’ve ridden this route — since before it was paved — but to me, when coming through here, it looks like an airport/highway/freeway/office park wasteland — you feel like you might be lucky to find a small, terrible, ground-floor, hidden cafe located in one of those monstrously-boring office buildings over there, and just to get there you feel like you’re going to have to cross over/under/through a bunch of near-death situations, so you won’t want to head in that direction unless you’re pretty certain there’s going to be _something_ of value over there. that sign might actually make me venture over there.

i would like a more detailed sign, probably one telling me more than just food — something telling me if i could get a beer. or telling me which eating places are located over there, just like many freeways do.

Maybe it’s just the picture angle, but that ‘path’ looks like a sidewalk. Or is there a separate path?

Skyport is a wide, soul-less traffic sewer but there’s at least one decent restaurant on it before it deadends with 1st Street. There’s also a coffee shop and a couple of sandwich shops there.

There’s pretty good density on that block north of Skyport, all of it within walking distance of light rail, and there’s an interesting little residential neighborhood (also within walking distance of light rail) hidden south of Skyport between 87, 880 and 1st that I discovered during the trail closure.